On Saturday, Sep 21, 2002, at 22:38 Asia/Tokyo, Robert Allerstorfer
wrote:
Hi,
the great Encode module requires perl 5.8. Are there
any backports existing yet that may work with 5.6.1? I am trying to
find a solution to encode Japanese (shiftjis) and Chinese (gb2312
and big5) into utf8 with that perl version since 5.8 is not yet used
widely, unfortunately.
Okay, let me repeat what I have said in this mailing list before.
0) Backporting Encode to 5.6.1 and perhaps 5.00503 was my first
intention when I joined (and later took over) the development thereof
1) Then I found Unicode stuff in 5.6.1 is very kaputt. At the same
time Encode was made very perl-5.8.0 dependent especially unicode
handling
2) So I concluded I would rather advocate perl 5.8 than pay some
effort to backport Encode.
3) Efforts by others to backport is welcome, provided
a) if it uses 'Encode' as module name it needs to work both in 5.8
and 5.6.1.
Bottom line is that backported version will not breach what it is
now. If it ain't broke,
don't fix it (and 5.6.1 was broke Unicode-wise)
b) if you just implemented Encode functionality in perl 5.6.1 but
incompatible w/ 5.8,
give it a different name; i.e) Encode::Compat
c) at any rate don't forget to share your idea and work here at
perl-unicode(_at_)perl(_dot_)org
Dan the Encode Maintainer
